Java News from Wednesday, July 14, 2004

The Apache Software Foundation has released Maven 1.0,
an open source "Java project management and project comprehension tool. Maven is based on the concept of a project object model (POM) in that all the artifacts produced by Maven are a result of consulting a well defined model for your project. Builds, documentation, source metrics, and source cross-references are all controlled by your POM.... Maven has many goals, but in a nutshell Maven
aims to make the developer's life easier by providing a well defined
project structure, well defined
development processes to follow, and a coherent body of
documentation that keeps your developers and clients apprised of
what's happening with your project.

The Big Faceless Organization has
released the Big Faceless PDF Library 2.2.3,
a $400 payware (more if you want support)
Java class library for creating PDF documents. The $1000
Extended Edition adds the AcroForms support, digital signatures, and
the ability to import and edit and existing PDF documents. Version 2.2.3 reduces memory usage and fixes bugs.
Java 1.2 or later is required.

Michael Koch has posted the
GCJ web browser plugin 0.3.0. This free-as-in-speech (GPL) plug-in runs Java applets in Mozilla 1.7 and compatible browsers using the GCJ virtual machine. Accoprdsing to Koch,
"This version is a great improvement over previous versions as the build and runtime dependencies are much smaller. Mozilla is not needed any more to build and run it and you can now use any java (tm) compiler to build the java source files. You are not limited to GCJ cvs anymore."

jZonic has released jLo 1.0,
an open source logging framework for Java that
supports multiple log-configurations.
It allows users to switch targets on or off independently of each other, rather than by threshold.
jLo is published under the LGPL.

IBM's alphaWorks has updated
their Abstract User Interface Markup Language (AUIML) Toolkit with
"Notable improvements to Web rendering, including layout and performance enhancements; also significant updates to documentation and samples."
This tool allegedly enables
"developers to write an application once and run it in Java Swing or on the Web without any changes. The AUIML Toolkit includes the AUIML VisualBuilder, which is an Eclipse-based visual panel editor built on top of the Eclipse Visual Editor Project. The AUIML VisualBuilder allows developers to easily build user interfaces and generate Java data and event-handling code for them. Additional Java code can be written to AUIML's API to control application flow, data validation, and to listen for events. Once the application is implemented, it can be deployed as a Java Swing application or as an HTML servlet without changing the application's code."